The present disclosure relates to electronic radar systems, and more particularly, to electronic radar warning systems.
Radar warning receiver (RWR) systems typically employ a standard comb look strategy to detect radar waves generated by scanning emitters of incoming active threats. A comb look pattern is a sequence of two or more identical dwell times spaced at a specific interval. The generated comb look pattern, however, must take into account one or more schedule budget constraints of the radar warning receiver system. The budget constraints include, for example, the minimum off-time (e.g., blanking budget) of the RWR emitter jammers. Thus, the duration of the dwell times in a hybrid comb pattern can be increased so long as dwell times do not exceed the blanking budget.
In order to optimize schedule budget usage, two or more dwell times are merged together to generate a hybrid comb look pattern. The hybrid merges are created by increasing the durations of the dwells in the comb look pattern to cover dwell times necessary to detect additional threats. Hybrid comb look patterns improve budget usage as intended, but are not optimal. For instance, many cases do not require that all the dwell times be modified in order to retain the desired Percentage of Intercept (POI). The standard definition of a comb look, however, requires that each and every dwell time in the comb look pattern must be modified if any dwell time is adjusted. Consequently, the conventional hybrid comb look strategy unnecessarily increases each and every dwell time within the comb pattern, thereby wasting duty factor usage.